As marine resources come under increasing human pressure from fishing, global warming, pollution and other changes, a group of researchers is increasing efforts to chart the catalogue of species, many of which are currently unknown to science, that inhabit marine environments little known to man. The survey of the world's oceans has so far pinpointed 38,000 marine species — and identified new f...

Is it possible to distinguish, as sociologist Arthur Frank proposes, an 'ideal of wonder' within which ill persons could recover some of their former sense of life and flourishing, even within the constraints of ill-health? Beyond this, are there more general benefits in terms of health and well-being that could accrue from cultivating an openness to wonder? In this paper I will first outline a...

Fans of TV science programs were likely captivated by the documentary about human evolution that premiered on PBS stations in 2014. ‘‘Your Inner Fish’’ provided a guided tour of the human body and where its many features came from— color vision and brain anatomy from primates, teeth and skin and hair from ancient reptiles, necks and fingers and eyes from primordial fish. The three-part series c...

I was recently preparing for a lecture on recursion for a first year programming course. The examples include computing the first n Fibonacci numbers, generating the permutations of a string and testing whether a string is a palindrome. For some reason I was inspired to find out a little bit more about the Fibonacci numbers in order to provide the class with a few interesting – for me, at least...

This article is based on a keynote address I gave in South Africa at the Eighth International Conference of The South African Association of Marital and Family Therapy. The phenomenon of witnessing is explored in a number of contexts, and a distinction is made between witnessing with and without awareness, and from an empowered or a disempowered position. I propose that the African philosophy o...